Much of Jesus’s teaching took the form of ‘parables’. To
explain some heavenly truth, He sometimes told a story –last week’s one was
about the youngster who wasted his inheritance but was welcomed home by his
father, to the disgust of his older brother. Sometimes He took a common human
experience – a woman finding a lost coin, a shepherd his lost sheep; or a net
full of a mixture of fish and rubbish; or seed sown in the ground.

And then again, Jesus sometimes performed a miracle to
reinforce the lesson he was teaching. St John in his gospel calls these miracles
signs – meaning that we must follow them up if we want to
understand the lesson He wants to teach us. Like those signs at the railway
station which say ‘Platform 1 for London; Platform 2 for Dartford’: if it’s
London you want to get to, you should follow the sign the Platform
No. 1 – and not go to any platform or get on any old train, at random.

So these three teaching-methods, Parables, Stories and
Miracles, have this in common: they need ‘unpacking’ and their meaning applied
to our everyday lives. If we just look on them as ‘a good story’, or ‘a
word-picture’, or a ‘remarkable event’ (which is what the word ‘miracle’ means)
then we shall misunderstand their purpose – . like someone seeing a sign which
says ‘Danger! Slow down!’ and thinking ‘what a pretty design!’ or ‘what a lovely
colour that sign is!’ and not doing what it tells him to.

In the same way, these two Great Sacraments, Baptism and Holy
Communion, which shall perform this morning, might be called ‘On-going Signs’.
They aren’t just ‘something Jesus once said, or did, many years ago for
the benefit of His hearers in the Eastern Mediterranean’. Today, as then, they
are miracles and signs which he tells his followers to ‘go on doing’
until the end of time. ‘Make disciples of all nations and baptize them’ and ‘Do
this in remembrance of me’. We must obey them in Lewisham 2007 as His
Disciples did in Palestine in 30AD.

Baptism and Holy Communion are miracles – events where the
Supernatural invades the world of the Natural. Don’t listen to anyone
who says that miracles don’t happen nowadays! They are happen daily – both in
this very building and throughout the world when the Mass is celebrated or
Baptism administered.

When someone is baptized, or receives the Sacrament of our
Lord’s Body and Blood, a miracle takes place no less real than those performed
by Jesus during his earthly ministry. But there are two differences between then
and now.

Firstly, Jesus usually acted byHimself when
performing of the gospel miracles he did so ‘openly’ – in order to be seen by
everyone present; secondly, most of them were ‘one-off’ miracles, seldom if
ever to be repeated. But today’s miracles of Baptism and Holy Communion
work differently.

Today’s miracles are also open in the sense that
anybody may benefit from them, but at the same time they are hidden from
the eyes of the unbelieving. To recognize them today we need to have to
have our eyes wide open.

Secondly He invites us to take part in them with Him. Holy
Baptism is a Sacrament which anyone laity or clergy can administer, and
should do so in an emergency – all nurses used to be trained how to baptise
people, especially new-born children if they seem likely to die and no priest or
deacon is available. It needs a Priest to celebrate the Mass but you’ve no doubt
noticed me taking the Blessed Sacrament and putting it into the aumbry every
Sunday both to enable housebound people to make their Communion at home, and, if
no priest is available people in Church can still receive communion.

But what do these two miracles do? Well, Baptism
makes us a Member of Christ, the Child of God, and an Inheritor of the
Kingdom of Heaven; Holy Communion incorporates or embodies us
within the Body of Christ, the Church on Earth, and, by tearing back the veil
which lies between us and God, unites us in one single Act of Worship with the
Church in Heaven, Angels, Archangels and the Faithful Departed who are no less a
part of that Mystical Body.

Two miracles, two sacraments – ‘generally necessary to
salvation’ as the Catechism says.

So now let you and me as the Church of God in this place,
without any more delay Baptise these two children into our fellowship, and
incorporate ourselves into the Body of Christ through Holy Communion, by playing
our allotted parts in these two miracles – which will now take place before our
very eyes!